Misfit City

Playing With Nuns: ‘Wave Equation’

With hundreds of releases in the bag already, it’s difficult to even summarise the dark-ambient work of Playing With Nuns (alias D.I.Y. Argentine noiseworker Ariel Chapuis), let alone sort it through item by item. However, a few things are apparent for ‘Wave Equation’. One is that (by the usual Playing With Nuns standards) it presents a gentler face. The titles of the recording and of the individual songs are more reflective than usual: the elegant mathematical graph-shot on the cover art is devoid of the forthright challenge of other releases, No huge and tilting cranes, no feral cartoons. No naked women wrapped up in hazard tape.

By the bullish, confrontational standards of some avant-noise artists this might be taken as signs of a cop-out; or at least a digression into mathematical navel-gazing. That’s not the case. To my ears, this recording’s sound world is one of giganticism – everyday objects ramped up to a stunning blur of over-scaled, colliding sound. At particular points, it’s borderline unbearable (which Chapuis would probably take as a sober compliment). It might not have you fretting over dysfunctional anger, but it might make you too scared to catch the bus.

On the other hand, there’s little here in the way of avant-garde theatrics. Everything is matter-of-fact. There’s no attempt to make an obvious wall of aural assault, or to engage in shock tactics for the sake of it. Chapuis simply lets his noises off the leash, and lets them take their course.

In Advertising For Lizards, plunderphonics are writ large against a dirty-celestial skirl of feedback. Scraps of conversation are distorted and giganticised into enormous blurred wind instruments and furniture drags. These roll and scrape, as if being pulled along the inside of a vast balloon, while Chapuis cunningly pans them around the sound-field.

I Let You Tools is a little more traditionally concrète, making a clear play of sampling construction devices, power drills and saws. It also deliberately deforms samples of other noises (including voices) into sounding like power tools before it collages everything that it’s found. The final result is a sandwich of technological interactions: almost a cartoon. A set of cheery telephone pulse-codes are sandwiched into it, trapped between a barrage of tool noises on one side and a rumbling wall of power-electronics on the other. The latter sails up to loom large and demanding, like an particularly needy cruise liner.

On Sequences of Lost Children, the clearest sound is two alternating organ notes. The dominant sound, however, is microphone-fry; sizzling and crackling around the clunk of struck pipework and the playful vocal grumbles of synthesizer. Throughout, there’s the crunch of an abused pickup, crushed and buffeted underwater. Unpleasant aural suggestions swim into place – a polluted zone for drownings, filled with ominous and suspicious objects. It’s immersive, threatening, possibly death-haunted. Perversely, all of this busy sonic activity inflates it with an uncomfortable life-force.

Initially, Wave Equation itself offers the closest thing to a let-up. A loop of pleased-with-itself electronic hum, waver-pulse and munching static chews the cud. For about a minute, it’s joined by a radio voice of crunched, compressed Spanish. This relative calm doesn’t last. After one-and-a-half minutes, the idiot noise arrives – an inflated shrieking grind which bounces and rolls over the static, over the percolating electronics, over everything.

Nine-and-a-half minutes long, the spectacularly queasy Decline & Fall is the album centrepiece. It sounds like dynamic travel sickness – a soundscape of hugely magnified stomach flutters, aircraft propellers and groaning feedback. Meanwhile, something is continually crashing and bouncing along the ground, ploughing up colossal waves and furrows of static. Imagine a fly’s-ear perspective of a Zeppelin crash… yet even that doesn’t communicate the terrifying, carefree attitude to the sound.

That’s the key to the unease in this record. Picture a world run out of control and shrunk down to the clatter of a battered and juddering gearbox; and picture ourselves, in turn, shrunk down to ant-scale and trapped inside it. There’s the feel that the grinding forces and crunch of object (in particular, Decline & Fall’s perpetually prolonged ongoing crash) is just business as usual – a humdrum and relentless process of clumsy mechanical brutality while machines plough and scrape their way between destinations and across targets, indifferent to the rattled and fragile animals within and around them. Whatever happens, happens. If it’s brutal, that’s simply the nature of things. It’s like that power-lathe which doesn’t mean to deafen you, but which certainly will deafen you if you sit next to it. It’s nothing personal.

Playing With Nuns: ‘Wave Equation’
Kopp Netlabel, KOPP.17
Download-only mini-album (free)
Released: 6th March 2011

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Free download from Kopp Netlabel (rightclick) or Archive.org

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Tags: apocalyptic roars, Ariel Chapuis, Buenos Aires, creeping horror, inklings of disaster, Playing With Nuns, rattlebag